


All You Have Is Your Fire

by Hoothootmotherf_ckers



Series: hope even on this side of the grave again [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Minor Character Death, also HEY HOW THE HELL DOES THE ANIMUS BELL WORK, because I have some IDEAS, my take on griffin's lich mechanics, visible bonds au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 04:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoothootmotherf_ckers/pseuds/Hoothootmotherf_ckers
Summary: It takes her a while to figure that out. It takes her a while to realize sheexists.Liches are not self-sustaining. They are constantly borrowing from the flow of magic, releasing it back into the universe once they’re done. They are eddies, diversions, an annoyance. But they are not separate, they are inherently connected to the cycling energy that flows through the world. Magic does not want to stop, be cut off, excised from the natural order.But the Umbra Staff doesn’t care what magic wants.--Lup's years in the umbrella; also, what thefuckis the Animus Bell





	All You Have Is Your Fire

Becoming a lich is seen as a way to gain power, a shortcut to immortality, as close as you can get to invincibility. And some of that is true - what is dead cannot die. A being of energy has access to indescribable power, to the ebb and flow of magic itself. 

But a lich is the furthest thing from invincible. Lup knows that all too well, now.

They weren’t hoping for unlimited power, immortality, any of that, at least not directly. They was desperate, terrified, tired of watching year after year as their family died, as they crept ever closer to losing for good. They knew what they stood to gain, but they also knew what they were risking. So Lup took the plunge and asked for one good day.

Becoming a lich takes strength, takes power, takes everything you’ve got - and still that’s not enough. You can’t become a lich alone. You need an anchor to yourself, and an anchor to your world. 

Lup knows who she is. Lup is fire and kindness and joy and anger and adrenaline and so much more. And she knows that, to the very core of her being. She has no fear of losing herself. 

That is not to say she’s unafraid of loss. Because if she becomes a lich, she won’t lose herself. But without an anchor, she’ll lose everything else, everything she ever loved. She won’t be undead - she’ll just die.

So she asks her brother for one good day. One day to reach out, to hold fast, to keep everything she loves in sight. One day to grab onto her family and hang on tight.

One day to remember, if she loses it all.

So she spends the day with Taako. It’s a day full of fire, of laughter, of joy and friendship and family. And at the end of it all, she sits down and tells him. She tells him what they’re risking, what the costs could be. She doesn’t leave anything back. Taako watches, and listens, and she can see the fear in his eyes, feel it reflected in her own. But she is his sister, he is her heart, he is the lynchpin this all hangs on. And she knows, as she looks in his eyes and feels fear in her heart and the steadiness in Taako’s gaze, that this will work. 

And so there they are the next day, Barry and Taako and Lup all gathered on a quiet hilltop. Lup squeezes Taako’s hand.

He smiles shakily. “See you in a few minutes, I guess,” and he shoos her away toward Barry.

Barry takes her hands. “You ready?”

Lup smiles, terrified and joyful and utterly determined. “As I’ll ever be.”

And they leap. For a moment there’s nothing, then there’s _everything._ Lup is a supernova, a nebula, death and life and potential and light. But only for a moment. Because at her core, she’s not a celestial body, a force of nature, a being of magic and space dust. Or well, she is a little. But underneath it all, she’s _Lup._ So she holds on to that knowledge, to that iron center, and pulls her nebula into the heart of a star.

She is phantasmal, and she is resplendent, and she is Lup. She burns like the sun, fire and reds and golds casting a blazing warm glow on the world around her. And when she solidifies into almost-elven, she feels a tug. After all, she’s technically dead now, and the Raven Queen wants what’s hers. 

But something, not a voice but something else, says _not today._

And Lup looks, and she laughs, at the sight before her. Six glowing cords - four gentle gold, one of gold and silver intertwined, and one so bright and brassy that it should hurt to look at - stretch out from her spectral form. She follows the brightest and grins over at Taako, who’s smiling in joy and relief and love. If the Queen wants her, she’ll have to go through him. She’ll have to go through all of them. And these bonds won’t break without a fight.

Lup burns, and she gleams, and she fights tooth and nail to the end of this century. The Hunger will not win. It will not take her newest home, it will not take her family, it will not take her friends. It will never take her.

So something else does.

It’s a stupid mistake, one she berates herself over too many times in the years to come. She has little else to do, after all. But a tiny mistake - a turned back, a poisoned blade, a pointless death. She’d brush this off, usually - whatever, fine, she’s spectral now. She’ll have to wait and rebuild, create a new body, deal with this later. But this pause is a fatal error.

Liches are not merely undead, they are beings of pure magical energy. They are eddies in the power that circulates the world, snags in the fabric of magic. They are strong, and they are nearly limitless. But they are not invincible.

In the snap between one moment and the next, Lup feels a pull. It isn’t the inescapable drag of the Astral Plane, or the lightness and looseness of scattering, of losing your core. Lup and her bonds are too strong for that.

It’s a quick, sharp yank, like the rug being pulled out from her feet. And she falls, tumbling and turning, forever and for an instant. And she is in a room.

It takes her a while to figure that out. It takes her a while to realize she exists. Liches are not self-sustaining. They are constantly borrowing from the flow of magic, releasing it back into the universe once they’re done. They are eddies, diversions, an annoyance. But they are not separate, they are inherently connected to the cycling energy that flows through the world. Magic does not want to stop, be cut off, excised from the natural order. 

But the Umbra Staff doesn’t care what magic wants. 

Lup spends days, months, years maybe as the tiniest spark, a fleck of iron will. She has no source of energy, no connection to the world, to magic, to what she needs to survive, to exist. The fragments of power that make up her form drift away, motes of golden dust floating up and out into nothingness. But as they do, as that tiny core disintegrates, Lup grabs on with all her strength and whispers _no._

She will not be nothing, will not dissolve, will not lose herself. She is Lup, and nothing will stop that. 

So she hangs on, she waits, she bides her time and concentrates her power. It’s not much, still the tiniest spark at her core. But she fans the flames, cradles that spark and gives it what flecks of kindling she can pull from the world around her. And then - 

There is a light.

Lup’s bonds flare around her for the first time in a decade, five gold, one gold and silver. They’re faint, trailing off just a few inches from the golden light that is Lup, but they’re there. And three are growing brighter.

Desperate, she draws on those bonds. The first signs of life, the first _anything_ Lup’s had in years, and she pulls as hard as she can, consumes the energy that pours through like a waterfall after a drought. And she wraps this energy around her, and she grows, and she is a spark that grows brighter and brighter until with a brilliant gleam she’s _something._ She’s Lup, elven and fire and radiant. She has a semblance of a form once again, and with a form comes senses. 

She sees the room she is in, dark and draped with shapeless curtains. But she also sees the world beyond, sees the dark cave where she breathed her last breath, the crumpled form of her skeleton and robe. And there is light - flickering torchlight grows, echoing her own flames, and she hears voices, familiar and so welcome. 

Magnus, Merle, and Taako step into the cave, her tomb. She can’t hear what they’re saying, can barely focus through the shock and the influx of power. They’re alive, they’re okay. They’re so close, for the first time in ten years. And she can’t do anything about it.

Or she can’t until Merle picks up her umbrella. Now, she has nothing against Merle, he’s a great guy. But the problem is, he’s not Taako. He’s not her brother. So Merle picks up her umbrella, and Lup just yells “NOPE!” 

Merle is launched across the room, hitting the wall with a thud. 

Huh, she thinks. That’s _interesting._

So Taako takes up her umbrella, her prison, and Lup watches and waits. Her perspective is still limited - she can only see for a few feet outside the staff, she can faintly hear speech but not distinguish words. But she realizes very quickly that something weird is going on. They’re on the moon, and that’s Davenport, oh shit that’s _Davenport_ , why is he dressed like that, but who is- does that mean that’s- _Lucretia?_

She sees when Lucretia notices the Umbra Staff, and she feels pain shoot through their faded bond, and Lup wants to scream. Of course. Lucretia isn’t a lich, or any of the others, and Barry isn’t here. They can’t see bonds like she can. They don’t know she’s alive. They found her fucking skeleton, and her robe and umbrella, and they didn’t find her. And liches aren’t invincible. 

Lup screams. No one notices.

She grits her teeth and starts to plan. So they don’t know where she is. That’s fine- or well, it’s really not, but she can _make it_ fine. She just has to figure out how to tell them. 

She starts siphoning more off the bonds, stealing bits of magic from Taako, from Lucretia, from Merle. She can draw on Magnus for emotional strength and stability, but he has no magic that she can borrow. And something’s blocking her off from Davenport’s power, and that scares her, but she can’t dwell on it. 

There’s a big boost on the train, when she snags that bow-tied asshole’s wand. She siphons little amounts of magic off everyone she meets, not enough to hurt them, not even noticeable, but it all adds up. And the arcane core- that’s helpful. She wraps these threads of golden power around herself and she bides her time. Though she can’t resist a slight display of fire, in her joy. 

And through all this, she helps her brother in what little ways she can. She gives tiny nudges to his magic missiles, making sure they fly straight. She makes sure to never be too far, to nudge herself back to his hand. It’s all little things, but it’s as much as she can do while she waits, builds her power enough for one big gesture. 

And then she sees him. The silver and gold bond flares with brilliant light as that official-looking man’s body falls to the floor, and in his place - it’s Barry. Barry’s here, Barry’s okay. Lup wants to shout with joy, she wants to hug him, hold his hand, talk to him. She wants to be _out of this fucking umbrella._ But she’s in here, and he’s out there, and she doesn’t have enough energy to do anything about it yet.

So she watches, peering through a window at her love, and she holds onto that gleaming bond like a promise.

And then, so soon after, she sees him again. She’s in a lab, and so much is wrong, and so much is right, because they world may be crystallizing around her but Barry is here again. Her bond is brightening, rising. And then she feels the very instant that Barry notices her umbrella.

The bond flashes so bright that she is knocked backwards, blinded. That’s not right, that’s not right at all, and she scrambles to her feet and watches in horror as Barry’s form blurs, sending out streaks of lightning. Her heart skips a beat as she realizes Barry doesn’t know she’s in the umbrella, and is instead taking this as another sign of her death. She shouts up at the sky, yelling “BARRY! I’M IN HERE! I’M ALIVE!” An endless litany of reassurances and cries for help, but he doesn’t hear any of it. And the worst part is that through all of this, she can feel herself growing stronger. As Barry loses his composure, the Umbra Staff is siphoning off the edges of his power, and giving it to Lup. She’s so close to enough strength to speak to him, but if he loses too much here, he could die. 

Barry flickers, teleporting away, and Lup slumps back against the walls of her curtained cell. She’s not sure if she should be relieved or not.

But awful as watching Barry was, his turmoil has inadvertently given her the last bits of energy she needs to send a message. She wraps magic around herself, spending days agonizing over what to do. She only has one shot, and it could take years to build up enough power to do this again. It has to work now. She waits, and she plans, and soon she knows exactly what to say and how. 

Her brother and friends seem to have somewhere along the way adopted a kid, all fluffy hair and big glasses. And it’s while Taako’s teaching this kid that Lup decides and mutters aloud, “You know what? Fuck it, we’re doing this now.” So she focuses, draws off just enough power for the spell she wants, and…

She mistimed it. The Umbra Staff releases a scorching ray of fire, and instead of sweeping across the walls it hits dead-on the poor kiddo’s tray of macarons. Lup lets out a string of curses that she’s glad the kid can’t hear. Well, oopsie-daisy, put that on the list of things to deal with when she gets out: _apologize for baked good destruction._

Now she’s short on energy, she doesn’t have enough for a full message, so she’s just got to work with what she’s got. With much more care and caution, she releases the rest of her power as fire, tracing beautiful cursive along the wall - _L U P._

She sits back, clapping her hands in excitement. It’s enough, it has to be enough - he couldn’t miss that, how would he ever miss that? Any second now, he’s going to make the connection, realize she’s in here, get her out and fix everything- 

But she waits, and she watches, and nothing’s happening. He’s not reacting, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s looking at, it’s almost as if he - as if- 

_no. NO!_

Dozens of memories flash through Lup’s head, fragments of context she hasn’t been able to pick up all now slotting into place. Why they didn’t react to Lucretia being so much older. Why her bond with Davenport is so strange. Why they have never seemed to recognize Barry, any of the times he’s shown up. 

Why they haven’t been looking for her. 

Lup screams yet again and watches her bonds burn bright around her. None are broken, they’re just all so weak, because she’s the _only one who knows they exist._ She doesn’t know how it happened. It must have been the Voidfish, but she can’t fathom why or how. It had to have been an accident, right? A mistake, some slip-up. Oh gods. Taako doesn’t remember her, and neither does Magnus or Merle. Something is incredibly wrong with Davenport. Did whatever stole Lucretia’s age take her memories too? She’s spiraling, trapped in a panic of realizing she might be trapped here forever, if no one can remember - wait.

Barry. Barry’s a lich, Barry’s dead, the Voidfishing doesn’t affect the dead! And he’s a lich, he can see bonds as well! Lup claps her hands to her face in exhausted relief. There’s someone out there who remembers her still, and who knows she’s not gone. She can trust Barry to find her. Even if he didn’t realize she was in the umbrella last time, that’s okay. She’ll just have to wait, gather up the energy for another few spells, and tell _him_ next time around.

She sits back down, still horrified and exhausted but settled. She has a plan. 

She redoubles her efforts, stealing up every scrap of magic she can. She pulls _hard_ on her bonds, angry and tired and sad, drinking up power from Lucretia, Taako, Merle, Barry - not Davenport. She needs power, but she figures that he needs it more right now. This should be noticeable, she thinks so anyway, but hopefully not too bad. Her family might notice the loss, and there’s a bit of a weird effect happening to the umbrella, now that so much magic is being pulled through it. A little energy is lost in a transfer, that’s just how magic works. But the little entropic scraps are getting caught in the umbrella, and it’s starting to get a bit of necrotic energy building up like static electricity. Eh, that’s probably fine…

A more pleasant side effect of gathering this power is that her senses start to come back. Her vision expands, actually further than her living eyes could see. She starts to feel things again, sunlight on the umbrella washing warmth across her spectral form. And most significantly, she can hear. It’s still fuzzy, still fades out at times, but for the first time in over a decade she can hear her brother’s voice. He’s so different, and so much the same, and she misses him so much.

And with the return of her hearing comes some revelations. Lup watches a funeral of sorts, the memories of one of Lucretia’s employees being fed to the Voidfish. This is noteworthy for a few reasons, and Lup falls to the floor with a silent thud as she starts to piece things together. That’s Fisher, and they’re still doing their Voidfishy thing, but her family seems to have been inoculated against them. And yet they don’t remember her. So there’s another Voidfish somewhere, probably. And if there is, odds are looking good that Lucretia has it. 

She’s not actually as angry about that as she expected, actually. Well, okay, there’s some yelling first, shouting up into the drapery of her prison. But when she really sits and thinks about it… She knows Lucretia. She knows what family means to her, the quiet girl who left her world as barely more than a child and spent an entire lifetime with six crewmates who became so much more. To make that family forget her, to quite possibly turn them against her entirely- that’s not something Lucretia would do lightly. She must have thought this was the only possible option. So Lup may not agree, but she gets it. Not really anything she can do about it in here, and also that literally doubles the amount of people out there who remember her existence, so that’s a nice surprise. 

And so now they’re off to the Woven Gulch, to bring back Magnus’s Relic. Lup’s more annoyed and tired than anything else. They tried so hard to hide these relics for good, keep the world safe from them - hell, Lup _died_ trying to hide hers - and it wasn’t enough. People still got their hands on them and turned worlds to crystal and trapped a town in a - was that a bubble?

The next hour is… strange. Lup’s used to some weirdness after her time as a flicker of energy, and time has never seemed quite the same outside the umbrella as in it. But this hour… She thinks it’s an hour. It’s a constant flicker of images, of red-brown stone walls and a mineshaft and a strange woman and a goddess and a temple and a golem and so much more, all interspersed with flashes of brilliant white light. 

And then it’s gone, and Lup’s blinking the afterimages away and Magnus is crying. What… what just happened? Was that Magnus’s Relic? Oh, she wishes she was corporeal so she could give him a hug right now. 

And then time is frozen, and Barry is there. Lup catches her breath as she feels her bonds strengthen, as she feels and influx of magic and emotion. They can’t see his face through the silver-black smoke, but she can. And he looks _happy._ He’s so proud, and his face is full of love, and it’s so heart-wrenchingly familiar that she misses him so much.

She’s so caught up in her emotions that she almost doesn’t catch what Taako says. “ _No_ we don't trust you! What kind of question is that?”

Her heart feels like it’s breaking. This shouldn’t be a surprise, not after all she’s seen. And yet Taako… Taako, Barry’s best friend after her. Taako, the only person they told about becoming liches. Taako, who Barry trusted with his worst fears as early as the beach cycle. 

Taako doesn’t trust him, and Barry starts to break apart. She watches in horror as he starts to lose himself, as his bonds aren’t enough anymore, as he sparks with crackling necromantic energy. She can only watch with her heart in her throat as he comes so close to losing himself, to as close as a lich can get to true death. And she watches with terrified relief as he pulls himself together just enough to get out, to survive.

And suddenly, relief washes away and Lup is _angry._ She screams at the world, at the walls of her prison, at herself. But she doesn’t let any of her power slip from her grasp, doesn’t burn with flame like before. She needs this. 

They think she’s gone. They won’t let her out. 

She’ll have to do it herself. And in the meantime, she has to protect them.

And so her focus shifts, channeling her love, her desperation, into rage. Her family is in danger. Lucretia is so alone, is withering away from who she used to be. Davenport… isn’t okay. Magnus, Merle, and Taako keep diving into danger, into situations where they’re not strong enough alone. And Barry is at risk of losing himself. 

So she gathers more power, until the umbrella is positively crackling with necromantic energy. She can see it - ripples of red electricity spark along her bonds, gathering in the folds of the curtains. It makes her hair stand on end, and this probably isn’t sustainable. But Lup doesn’t care. It doesn’t have to be sustainable - either it’ll work, or it won’t. Because Lup is developing a terrifying, live-or-die, all-or-nothing plan.

She doesn’t know exactly what would happen if the Umbra Staff broke. It’s not exactly something she could have tested. But Lup is one of the most skilled and talented necromancers in- probably the whole universe, honestly. You can learn a lot in a hundred years. So she knows theory, she knows case studies, she knows what _probably_ would happen.

If it had broken in Wave Echo Cave, if it had been burned in Phandalin… that would have been it. She was just a tiny spark of energy, and there wasn’t enough holding her together. She would have dissolved, the energy that made up her consciousness dissipated back into the cycle of magic. Undead can’t ever technically die, but that would’ve been the end of Lup. 

Liches are a three part system. They are pure magical energy, tied to their forms by their knowledge of who they are, tied to this plane by the bonds they form. And Lup knows who she is, she knows who she loves. But the strongest knowledge and bonds need something to hold together, and for so long, Lup barely had that. If she lost too much energy, then the bonds would collapse and her form fade away. She would be gone. The Umbra Staff would shatter, and that would be the end. 

But she hopes there’s a way around that. No, not hopes. She knows. She is the most powerful necromancer ever seen on dozens of planes, and she has to believe this is going to work. She can’t let herself consider for a second that it could fail. She cannot doubt herself.

So Lup pulls on more energy, and she starts weaving. Once, it was enough to just wrap it around herself, a loose tangle of power around her sparking core. But for this to work, it has to be better. She’s sort of been solid, before, but not quite. Hands would form when she clapped, a face would emerge when she spoke, but she’s been a nebula, a cloud of fiery gold with occasional flashes of solidity at its core.

But now she has to become a star. She takes the wisps of energy and spins them into threads, weaves them into bone and muscle and skin and fire. Red and gold twine together, condensing into something almost complete, almost there. Her senses improve. Her control strengthens. There will be no more accidental bursts of power now. 

No, now they’ll be intentional.

Her brother, brilliant wizard, transmutation expert, best of their plane, does something _so fucking stupid_ that she can barely believe it. Lup spends a couple minutes with her head in her hands as her brother, her death criminal, friend and sibling of liches, on the run for the Raven Queen brother, takes one of the Raven Queen’s primary enforcers who has already tried to kill him on a date to a wine and pottery place. 

The _fuck,_ Taako???

So they chat, and they make pottery, and Taako flirts, and Lup is losing her ever-loving mind, but she’s holding it together. The reaper - Kravitz? - doesn’t exactly seem interested in arresting him anymore, so if all goes well then he won’t notice anything weird and Taako can get back to, you know, saving the world and committing death crimes.

But that’s not what happens. They’re walking, and Lup is just beginning to let herself relax when the reaper says, “There's something here. There's something here, Taako, it was in the Millers’ lab too, I could feel it. It's dead and it's powerful and it's extremely close.” 

And Lup panics, because she forgot. She forgot the side effect of her energy theft, the static of necromantic magic that’s been building up on the umbrella. Taako wouldn’t have noticed it, no - only somebody specifically trained to seek out necromantic power could have picked up on it. Fuck.

So she panics, and she acts. She pulls some of that close-knit energy and aims, and she shoots a bolt of flame straight at the reaper’s head.

Or she would, anyway, if Taako hadn’t caught on and redirected it. Damn it, Taako! She’s only trying to help you! You’ve known this dude for like a day total and he spent most of that trying to kill you! What the fuck!

And then Taako hands the Umbra Staff over to the reaper and Lup stops breathing. 

Somehow, thank Istus and Pan and every other god up there except maybe the Raven Queen, he doesn’t catch on. He thinks she’s maybe a curse, and Lup would be almost offended if she wasn’t so relieved. A curse, really? She’s so much better than some kind of two-bit curse. Man, the Queen needs to find some better employees. 

But then the reaper’s gone, and it’s time for the last relic. And here’s where Lup starts to get scared.

See, Barry was pretty quiet about what his bell did. It was too powerful, it was more intense than he meant to make it. He was scared and he was, to some extent, ashamed. The Oculus, the Gauntlet - sure, those could be very bad in the wrong hands. But they were nothing compared to the Animus Bell, to what someone without scruples, without morals, could do with it. So he didn’t talk about it, and no one on the Starblaster knew what it did.

But he and Lup told each other everything. So she knows, and when Lucretia starts explaining, she wants to scream. She’s horrified, horrified to learn that _this_ is what happened to Lucretia, horrified that Lucretia doesn’t even know how it happened. Horrified that her family is about to dive straight back into this nightmare. They don’t know what the Bell even does, and worse, they don’t know who has it. But Lup feels sick, feels cold, because she knows. 

Because the Bell is bad on its own, but it’s absolutely _terrifying_ in the hands of liches.

Barry refused to use it, had gone to Lup in horror when he realized what he’d done. The Light of Creation was powered by bonds, and it only made sense that that connection showed up in one of the Relics. Of course, that wasn’t really clear to a layman. If you don’t know much about bonds, the Bell has a few basic uses. It can kill people very efficiently, and that seems to be about it.

Liches, as the only beings who can see bonds, can do a little bit more with it.

Most of what Edward and Lydia did was actually fairly straightforward magic. Aging, memory loss, injuries - hell, any good enough wizard could do that. But the way they did it, and they way they powered it, now that was the horrifying part. 

The Animus Bell allows its user to create, manipulate, and even sever bonds. Barry only intended the first, and of course the Wonderland liches don’t give two shits about that. Instead, they first focus on the second. Most liches can draw on their own bonds, borrow power from their loved ones. It’s what Lup has been doing for years now. But with the Bell, Edward and Lydia can draw on the bonds of others. It’s not that simple, of course. Bonds aren’t defenseless, aren’t just there for anyone to take. But if you hurt someone enough, make them angry and tired and sad and in pain, their defenses weaken. And liches, like spectral parasites, can break through.

At first, Edward and Lydia just stole energy, took bright and colorful magic and emotions and twisted them to tired and grey and theirs. But then they realized a more effective way of doing things. After all, since they can see a person’s bonds - well, that’s a good starting point of what buttons to push. 

They don’t just steal power through bonds anymore - they start to spy, to invade, to look along a person’s bonds and through their emotions, through their memories. They look at Merle’s brightest bonds, and ask for a memory that would fracture them. They look at the faded wisps of Magnus’s and ask for the one who broke them. They look at Taako’s… and pause. They don’t know what to do, so much of what is important to him is tied to a bond that’s just disappeared, not broken and yet not there. They can’t touch it.

For the first time in over a decade, Lup is selfishly glad to be inside the umbrella. And then she isn’t, because the liches decide that if they can’t hurt his bonds, they’ll just hurt him. 

Lup screams and cries and rages as she watches her family suffer, watches the energy bleed off of their bonds and into the ever-watching liches. She could stop this. She could take the Bell, she could use it right, she could repair the bonds and save her family and fix things.

But she can’t. She’s almost solid, almost able to break free, but she’s just barely short, and it’s too soon. To try now would quite possibly destroy her.

And then she sees Magnus, and sees the Animus Bell ring, and she thinks it might have been worth it anyway. 

There are two kinds of bonds. There are the bonds of relationships, of family, the brilliantly glowing cords that connect loved ones to each other, the ones that powered the Starblaster and keep liches tied to the Material Plane. But there’s also the subtler bonds, the ones that keep souls together, tie a consciousness to a physical form, the bonds created by the knowledge of who you are, the ones that keep liches from dissolving into magic. 

The Animus Bell can sever both. 

She watches, screaming, as Magnus’s soul is ripped from his body, thrown toward the Astral Plane. She watches Edward use the Bell to take his place, a parasite with the face of her friend.

She watches, white knuckled, as Merle and Taako make a brilliant and risky and dangerous play, as they reach out with their magic, with their bonds, and tell the liches and the laws of magic themselves to fuck off. She doesn’t breathe until Magnus is grounded, in a mannequin body instead of his own, and Barry is there. Barry is here, and all four of them have turned on the liches to fight with everything they have. 

In an instant, terror gives way to all-encompassing _fury._ She is incendiary, she wants to destroy these liches, these beings who corrupted Barry’s work and turned it on their family. 

And then, she gets her wish. Mannequin-Magnus reclaims the Chance Lance from his possessed body, and with a brilliant beam of radiant energy Magnus’s body is thrown back, and Edward is thrown out. 

And the Umbra Staff, doing what it does best, eats him. And then he’s in that curtained room, and he’s standing before Lup. 

She doesn’t know what she looks like to him, almost whole but not quite. She doesn’t know that he sees her and flinches back in terror, sees a woman engulfed in flames, an unearthly angel of retribution. She is a star, ageless and brilliant and furious, and she doesn’t know that her smile, sharp and bright and angry, could put nightmares in the hearts of people much braver than Edward. 

She does know this.

“Are you the one who’s been hurting my brother out there?” It’s not really a question. “I’m going to fucking kill you now.”

And she screams, and flames engulf the room. Brilliant gold fire spills from her form, first burning away Edward’s glamour and then eating at the blackened shadows that make up his spectral body. And as the fire burns, as it consumes the remnants of sickly and twisted magical power, Lup glows brighter and brighter. Everything her fire touches becomes fire as well, and soon all the power Edward had stolen, all the magic he’d leached from the world, it’s all hers now.

And Lup is whole, and she burns brighter than a thousand white-hot suns, and with a flick of a hand she throws the remnants of Edward’s soul from the umbrella, and watches in satisfaction as it crumples into ash. 

There’s a beat, then a scream, and then Lydia shatters. All the stolen magic she held is released with the breaking of the only bond she had, and Wonderland burns. Lup smiles, almost drunk on the sudden influx of power after years of hoarding scraps.

And then the next few hours pass in a blur. Barry gets his body back and she’s just so happy to see him alive again, and then Lup feels something extremely strange. She watches as he puts on a headband, and then she feels her brother’s mind brushing up against hers. 

Her heart swells, and she blurts out, “Trust Barry. Love Barry.” Fuck, he doesn’t know her name, he’s still Voidfished, this will have to work. “Taako, it’s - it’s me, it’s your sister, it’s me, trust Barry.” 

An orb comes down, and they’re off to the moon, and the Costco, and Lup can’t focus. She has the power she needed, then she can be out, she can be free, she can be with her family and her friends and they can be together. She just needs one last nudge. 

And then Taako points the Umbra Staff, points her, at Lucretia, and his voice is shattered and she’s terrified again. They’re so close to being back together, she’s so close, she will not lose her family now. But the tension is broken by the shattering of glass and the emissaries of the Hunger and there’s no time, they have to fight or they will not live to confront each other. So Taako fights, and Lup burns, and she will not let this be the end. Taako is knocked to the ground, she is thrown from his hand, and creatures of darkness are approaching, and a child’s hand grabs the umbrella.

Lup unleashes a ball of flame at the Hunger, engulfing anything that threatens the one she loves. And finally, _finally,_ someone has realized, and she’s giddy and terrified as the wonderful genius macaron child detective throws the umbrella - throws her - to Taako. 

And then Taako, her brother, her best friend, her heart, snaps the Umbra Staff over his knee. There is a burst of flame, of joy and anger and elation and fire, as a supernova emerges where the umbrella once was. And then it smiles. 

Lup is phantasmal, and she is resplendent, and nothing is going to stop her anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I continue to have strong opinions about how Griffin McElroy's liches work. And also the Animus Bell. A lot of the mechanics in this were inspired by _The Amber Spyglass_ by Phillip Pullman, _Beanstalk_ by E. Jade Lomax, and _Firewing_ by Kenneth Oppel, which are three _wildly_ different books. Also a little bit from actual real world physics. 
> 
> Title from Hozier's "Arsonist's Lullabye."


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